In fact, this archetype was derived from an internal ingenieux project - a backend for ekaterminal,
which is another piece of software we are fairly confident you'll love it if you do elastic beanstalk/mapreduce too often.

Setting up your Maven Build

This project, as is, supports modes 1-2 (settings.xml), and it looks by default for aws.amazon.com.

Don't worry, you're likely to do it once for each and every machine you plan to build. :)

Configuring your Project

We suggest convention over configuration, but anyway. The only setting you're likely to set is your cnamePrefix value in your pom.xml file.

Make sure you pick something unique and unlikely to conflict with other users.

Deploying

Simply call mvn deploy -Pdeploy

If your environment is Ready (Green or Red), it will deploy. If not, a new version will get published.

You can always launch a new environment...

Launching an Environment

If you did the previous step, it will create a new elastic beanstalk application for you in AWS Console.

From the console, click in "Launch New Environment". In this dialog, not all options are available, so initially set the Health Check URL to the /debug handler:

/services/api/v1/debug

Don't launch it yet, though. We have some tips...

Environment / Configuration Tips:

We suggest you save your environment into a configuration template once you're happy. We suggest envname-yyyymmdd-nn, where NN is a number which gets incremented.

Also, AWS told us its a bad idea to have matching environment names / applications, and even have the same environment named across different regions. In fact, they suggest you to add the -env suffix to make it easier to spot environments, environmentIds, and other oddly-named things.

Setting the Proper Health Check URL

Besides that, make sure you can map to an SSH Key you already have, so you are able to log into your EC2 Instance and troubleshoot any problems (unlikely, but better safe than sorry).

Ok, now you can launch.

Once the application is launched (and there's a Green Icon), click in "Edit Configuration" and set your applications AWS Access Key / Shared Key, then you can set set the proper Health Check URL:

/services/api/v1/health/check

SCM Notes

Git Fast-Deploy

Please never commit the contents of your tmp-git-staging directory.

Its there to cache locally and enable fast deployments into elastic beanstalk via the git backend.

(if you look closely, thats the reason for both .gitignore and .hgignore files)

Code Notes

Testing

The project includes a lot of boilerplate code useful for AWS. We tried to achieve a mix (e.g., avoiding adding too much dependencies), and if you want, you're free to get rid of it.